Calvi is
another name for Cales, the ancient city taken by
the Romans in the 4th century BC in their very early
stages of empire building; that is, they were just sort of
moving the city limits out a bit. The Roman remains of
Cales may still be seen today near Sparanise, 40 k/25
miles north of Naples (photo,
right, by P. Mesolella). The modern town on the ancient site is
named Calvi risorta (Calvi reborn!). Before the
Romans, Cales had been the center of an earlier Italic population called
the Ausones (or Ausoni in modern Italian), a
people that inhabited areas of southern Italy well beyond
Campania by about 1000 BC. That people may have come from
Greece, but there is also archaeological evidence of
Etruscan origin or at least influence. The source of the
name Cales may(!) be the proper name Calai,
mythologically said to be one of Jason’s companions aboard
the Argo and to have founded Cales, this first
Ausonian center of population in Campania. (There are also
other places in southern Italy that claim connection to
the Argonauts. For more, see entries on The
Heraion near Paestum, Sirens,
and Hilltowns of Cilento.)
(There are other etymological possibilities for Cales.
They range from the mundane and plausible Greek, kale=beautiful,
to the very far-fetched, after the city of Callah,
mentioned in Genesis 10:11! Pick one. Or make up your
own.) As far as the letter V goes in the modern name,
there are some Latin spellings of Cales as Calus—but,
of course, the Romans used V, not U; thus, you wind up in
the Middle Ages with some fancy orthographic hocus-pocus
giving us Calvi. In any event, by the time the Bourbons
got around to building one of their royal residences and
hunting grounds here, the area around the old ruined city
had been called the Domain of Calvi for a very, very
long time.

Asrecently as
World War II the Bourbon buildings in the Demaniodi Calvi were in relatively solid condition; these
included the main residence and the chapel. Then the
retreating Germans shelled it in 1943 and the rest is all
downhill. It was a barracks, a stable and then even an
elementary school until about 30 years ago. Part of the
premises were then demolished to make room for a road, and
other parts became a rubbish dump.The whole thing was
generally subjected to all the ignominies of chaotic
post-war overbuilding in the Campanian plain behind
Naples. By 2002 the site had apparently been taken over by
a squatter farmer who made his own "deprovements." (Is
that a word? I hope so.) The former Bourbon premises were
in worse condition than the remains of ancient Cales. Some
funds, however, were allocated in 2008 for the restoration
of whatever remained: laws were drafted, speeches given,
banners draped, committees formed, and a book was written
about the site (il Demanio di Calvi, il Casino, la
Cappella e altre amenità calene by P. Mesolella,
Spring publishers, Caserta, 2008. Book cover, right. The
word calene in the title is the adjective for Cales
in modern Italian.) There seemed to be some enthusiasm for
restoring what was once an impressive part of the Bourbon
architectural/cultural heritage of the kingdom of Naples.

An inventory from 1910 of this historic relic
speaks of a piece of property some four square km in area;
it included a Western Tower, a 12-room Casino Reale, a
chapel and other out buildings. There were woods, stables,
parks and room for the hunt. It was, indeed, one of Ferdinand IV’s favorite haunts
and the place where he spent some years of his life
writing letters to Luisa
Migliaccio Partanna, the woman would then become his
“morganatic” * wife after the death of his first
wife, queen Caroline.

*(morganatic:
from matrimonium morganaticum, literally
"marriage with a morning gift," referring to a gift
given to the wife on the day of marriage, in lieu of any
share in the husband's property. The term designated a
form of marriage in which a nobleman, in this case, king
Ferdinand, married a woman of lower social status with
the provision that, although children would be
legitimate, neither they nor the wife might lay claim to
the husband's rank or property. In other words, she
became his wife but not his queen.)

This miniature
royal palace was built in 1779. The architects were Francesco
Collecini (1723-1804) and Giovanni Patturelli
(1770-1849). The former was one of Vanvitelli’s
students and then his assistant in the construction of the
vast Caserta Palace (see table) and also the architect who
built the Carditello residence (table). The residence at
Sparanise was built before Carditello and is described as
comparable to it in every way; that is, a typical bit of
Bourbon splendor in the classical style of Vanvitelli.

A lot of things can happen to buildings and land
from 1789. In this case, the list is endless, but the site
survived flooding and even the turmoil of Italian
unification and, as noted, the property was intact in 1910
and even later during at least part of WWII.
(Unfortunately, the Demanio di Calvi lay along the main invasion route of the Allied
armies in late 1943 as they pursued the retreating
Germans up towards Mt. Cassino and Rome.) But the main
problem is simply the disastrous overbuilding in the
Campanian plain since the 1950s. Old pieces of property
were simply taken over illegally, old buildings were torn
down and if they were not torn down, they were stripped
bare of anything that could be salvaged. I am not aware
that the enthusiasm from 2008 to restore whatever can be
saved in the Demanio di Calvi has generated any tangible
results.